YouTube is awful - The sexual harassment genre.

[Aldurin]

I don't usually make these kinds of threads because I don't actually stick my arms in the mud that much. I stay away from the clickbait, shallow stuff and "shit on display" discussions, hell the only txt twitter I follow is @forexposure_txt since it's mostly bad business instead of the pit of despair that the others are. So I was also really unaware of just how successful some people have been on YouTube with videos themed around sexual harassment.

So I just saw this video that one of my RL friends shared and I'm still trying to take it in. Never heard of Laci Green before but she's definitely cool she has many strong opinions of varied quality. But I could barely watch the clips in there from the people she's calling out.

r9qVaMhnJB8

I like the internet, I really do. But boy does it make it challenging to like it when all of the awful people in the world can find their own echo chamber regardless of distance. And it's brought a few things to my attention that I didn't think were that bad.
1. The people making these videos around "pranks" on women aren't being arrested for what anyone should realize is something really awful. I can only hope that most of their cut footage is of them having to back off because either a the target or a heroic passerby managed to intimidate them away, but I could be and probably am wrong to hope that.
2. The popularity of these videos indicates that the "women should yield to men" portion of the voices of the world are far more numerous than I imagined. I figured before that it was the largest of the terrible vocal minorities, but still very thinly spread. I'm realizing that's probably egregious understatement.
3. These videos aren't being taken down by YouTube until they become so prominent in the media that they're taking it down if only to not look bad. I just expected in the past that content this bad would be flagged and removed relatively quickly.
4. These people make a living by sexually assaulting women and showing it to the world for others to laugh at. As with YouTube, Sam Pepper's monetization network only dropped him after this became an issue from what I can tell, which means that they're just dodging bad PR instead of actively policing their own partnered channels to keep this stuff out.

This is probably just preaching to the quire for most of this forum, but this video is good for pointing out not just the problem, but the scale of it. Run it by your friends that might need help grasping this issue.

[Aerozord]

I hate to say it but truth is the solution is, ignore it and it will go away. Like you said if you spread news about it than it becomes click-bait. Lots of youtube channels and websites make their money by farming off the hatred of others. There are other things that can be done, can inform people of influence like advertisers or government of the genre but thats abit of a calculated move. I bet most of these people are perfectly content with this ballooning in a media storm, making their cash, than bursting.

Only real way to discourage a youtube trend is to avoid it, dont search for it, dont click it, and dont give others a reason to do the same. This kind of thing is apart of "there is no bad PR"

[Aldurin]

I hate to say it but truth is the solution is, ignore it and it will go away. Like you said if you spread news about it than it becomes click-bait. Lots of youtube channels and websites make their money by farming off the hatred of others. There are other things that can be done, can inform people of influence like advertisers or government of the genre but thats abit of a calculated move. I bet most of these people are perfectly content with this ballooning in a media storm, making their cash, than bursting.

Only real way to discourage a youtube trend is to avoid it, dont search for it, dont click it, and dont give others a reason to do the same. This kind of thing is apart of "there is no bad PR"

I don't think that is the case, since they get by on the viewership of people who don't know or don't care that this kind of content is wrong. Seeking out these problems may affect their viewership, but it's effective as long as the situation is brought to light.

The "ignore it and it will go away" strategy wouldn't have caused Sam Pepper to have his videos flagged for policy violations and for him to be dropped from his partnered network, because from their world everything would have been fine as long as the viewership ad money came in and the bad PR didn't happen.

Any sort of problem where people are obliviously or actively promoting sexism or racism has to be actively countered, whether through raising awareness among the oblivious or effectively discrediting and punish those who willingly are part of the problem. The idea of passively solving a problem only encourages the mindset that your effort isn't needed to make the world a better place, when it actually is.

[Aerozord]

I said for "US" to do. That wasn't us, that was a partnered network and google enforcing their policies.

This is media, be it love or hatred both feed it. What kills media is apathy, realizing its not worth mentioning. I mean I didn't even know this existed, now if I was curious and checked it out, there thats a few more views. They are more than happy to take the free advertisement.

[edit]sorry if that came out mean-spirited. feeling abit agitated. I agree, be against it, just not sure this is the best way to fight it.

[Aldurin]

I said for "US" to do. That wasn't us, that was a partnered network and google enforcing their policies.

This is media, be it love or hatred both feed it. What kills media is apathy, realizing its not worth mentioning. I mean I didn't even know this existed, now if I was curious and checked it out, there thats a few more views. They are more than happy to take the free advertisement.

[edit]sorry if that came out mean-spirited. feeling abit agitated. I agree, be against it, just not sure this is the best way to fight it.

There are ways to fight against this. One thing is secondhand exposure to the problem, which can avoid the complication of increasing their viewership statistics (like with the video I posted in the first post, which uses footage from videos that are part of the problem, but that video itself is acting as part of the solution through awareness). You don't have to directly show MLP fanporn to a parent to convince them that their 8-year old daughter who is a fan of the show should be carefully discouraged from looking up MLP content, as awareness through secondhand accounts/exposure can sufficient enough to get the point across. Firsthand exposure is only necessary if you want to be directly in the fight, or understanding the finer details of the debate/conflict in process.

Second is that apathy doesn't affect the standard online business model so simply. A starting channel/account/business will surely die if they can't overcome the apathy problem, since if no one cares then no one cares to mention to anyone else, which leads to no reputation that can help bolster advertising returns. But one that is already stabilized with at least six-digit regular viewership (Sam Pepper is over 2.3 million subscribers, which is well past the minimum point needed to sustain monetization of a partnered YouTube account) can get away with being apathetic to the apathy portion of their potential audience, as their existing actual audience sustains enough long-term viewers while maintaining a positive viewers gained versus viewers lost.

Basically, it's the idea of "I won't shop at Walmart because of their business practices" or "I use less paper to lessen the impact on deforestation" or similar situations where someone who says they are fighting a problem are merely distancing themselves from it. Walmart doesn't care if a person chooses not to shop at their stores, as they already sustain themselves by pushing closer to monopolizing the retail industry and their existing base of regular shoppers. Sure, it's lost profit from the money you're not giving them, but the only loss is lost opportunity of having another customer. If not having every potential customer as a customer actually hurt a business significantly, then monopolization would be the default and competition would have to wage all-out war against each other to remove their competitor before both sides financially bleed out and bankrupt. Using less paper sounds good environmentally, but a few people doing it won't visibly affect the demand from the logging companies who will continue working and supplying at the same rate as before.

The only way that form of protest can actually work is if you organize enough people close to or within a business' active audience base to be on board with this. A dozen people who don't subscribe to a multi-million subscriber Youtube channel don't matter to the channel owner, but if a significant percentage of their subscriber base unsubscribes and spreads a case for why others should do so, it will damage their revenue stream enough that they will have to make changes to how they operate that channel if they want to recover from that. The apathy treatment is only effective in large scale, but can't be grown from external apathy.

But this is a very complicated issue to get into, and these optimal scenarios for making this solution work can ask for a lot of commitment for people who don't want to drop the rest of their life to focus on fighting a specific problem. And the above stuff is my general understanding of how that problem can be addressed, but it doesn't give a sure path to me or anyone else of how to deal with it.

[rpgdemon]

Yeah, you really can't just ignore someone with 2.4 million people watching and absorbing what they say as good, and assume they'll go away.

Especially when he's pretty much raped a bunch of women, according to the stories in the video above. There's no way that you can excuse an opinion of, "Ignore that."

[Marc v4.0]

"Just ignore it and it will go away" doesn't really hold any damn weight as a tactic of combat considering a fair amount of people didn't know this was going on and, now this is key, IT WAS STILL HAPPENING ANYWAY.

[pochercoaster]

Okay, so I just watched the video. Wow.

<irrelevant> if a guy managed to get close enough to me to handcuff me, he would promptly get thrown on the ground and have his windpipe stepped upon. hard.<irrelevant>

Tangential: This shit isn't really surprising to me since sexual harassment has always been a thing, whether or not it's on camera. The most recent incident where I was groped was when a customer grabbed my breasts while I was at work (about a year ago). The store manager gave the customer a stern talking to, but didn't ban him, so every time I see this customer in the store I have to go in the back to calm down because it's a struggle to contain my anger at him. It's also seriously coloured my perception of upper management at my job.

The only difference between the shitbags who grope women (on public transit, at work, at bars, or just any time they don't have their fuckin' consent) and this guy is that this guy records it on camera. And, you know, I generally say the kind of people grope women are opportunists and try to do it when other people aren't looking or they've set up some kind of situation where they have an excuse for their behaviour, because they're aware that what they're doing is wrong and don't want to get caught, but this guy is brazen enough to videotape it. And you know what? He fuckin got away with it because he knows people are ignorant enough to not see what's wrong with it.

So, this behaviour is clearly disgusting and symptomatic of a sexist culture where consent isn't considered important, especially when it's women's consent, because women aren't seen as full human beings that exist outside of fulfilling men's sexual desires.

Yeah, no, ignoring this shit in the hopes it will go away is, sorry to be blunt, plainly stupid. Most people are only peripherally aware of sexism and rape culture, if they're aware of it at all. It's a hugely complex issue and needs to be talked about constantly to counter the media's dominant tendency to be passive with these issues. Ignoring it is enabling it. We have to name the behaviour, why it's wrong, and tell people to stop doing it. We can't ignore it or, worse, treat it like it's an inevitability. This does not have to be the default way we treat women.

Edit: Like, this isn't "media." This isn't a "youtube trend." This is sexism, something you find in every corner of our culture- in this particular case, it took the form of a youtube trend, but sexism isn't inherent to youtube trends, and it's wrong to paint it that way.

[Solid Snake]

...Fuck my life, this isn't what I needed to see to start my day today. Faith in humanity is now dipping into negative integers.

(Though I guess the fact these assholes are finally receiving negative attention is a blessing of a sort.)

Also, did Sam Peppers seriously attempt a "This was really about me exposing a relatively rare form of abuse against privileged individuals by sexually abusing far more likely victims of sexual abuse in a completely unrelated manner and then assuming you'd all somehow make the connection that I was criticizing completely unrelated conduct despite the fact that that leap in logic makes absolutely no fucking sense and, even if it did make sense, would not justify me committing actual criminal offenses to prove said point" defense?
...Like, that was actually a thing that happened?

I don't know what's more shocking, the fact that he thought anyone might actually buy that explanation as a justification for his atrocious conduct, or the fact that his sorry ass isn't rotting in a jail cell.

[Kim]

"Ignore it and it will go away" is the argument of the entitled, because it is true for them. If you don't talk about it, it goes away for them since it doesn't affect them, and they can pretend women aren't still being groped and raped by abusive men.

[Karrrrrrrrrrrresche]

Also, did Sam Peppers seriously attempt a "This was really about me exposing a relatively rare form of abuse against privileged individuals by sexually abusing far more likely victims of sexual abuse in a completely unrelated manner and then assuming you'd all somehow make the connection that I was criticizing completely unrelated conduct despite the fact that that leap in logic makes absolutely no fucking sense and, even if it did make sense, would not justify me committing actual criminal offenses to prove said point" defense?
...Like, that was actually a thing that happened?



He most definitely did! The first video went up with out a 1/3 to my knowledge. The second was 2/3, and the conclusion was a very... interesting confession about how, all along, this had been a social experiment! To prove that we'd react more negatively to the women being harassed than the men.

Only that wasn't even how it happened. The second got taken down faster than the first, and people were arguably more outraged, possibly because he seemed to be attempting to justify the initial video by "Equalizing'.

All of it was rendered moot before the cockamamie bullshit idea ever came out though because, hey, this ain't his first really shitty video.
Mabe they were all social experiments too! Ones that he's been sitting on for months, and years, letting millions of people laugh and laugh about them before springing the trap on us.
Probably not.

And that said, his little "Reveal" video was sure ready to chastize people that were mad at him, that hated what he had done to women but weren't reacting as negatively to men, but, according to my incredibly flawed human memory he kind of neglected to mention or berate THE PEOPLE WHO DEFENDED HIM. WHO ANGRILY SHOUTED THAT FEMINAZIS WERE RUINING THEIR FUN AND SHOULD GO DIE FOR THINKING HE SHOULDN'T DO THESE THINGS.

So yeah.

[Solid Snake]

He most definitely did! The first video went up with out a 1/3 to my knowledge. The second was 2/3, and the conclusion was a very... interesting confession about how, all along, this had been a social experiment! To prove that we'd react more negatively to the women being harassed than the men.

Holy shit.
Like, everything he did was unbelievably misogynistic, but perhaps the most telling sign of this guy's brazen misogyny is that, upon being called out, his default response to avoid condemnation for his misogynistic beliefs still involved advancing the argument that men were the bigger victims.

Like, you have to be deep in a wellspring of fucking awful misogyny if, even upon realizing you're in trouble for your hatred of women, the solution your mind gravitates to escape that trouble and salvage your reputation still involves an irrational hatred of women.

"How dare they be able to get away with more sexual misconduct than men!" Screams the privileged asshole, who literally just fucking made a video in which he himself abused women in the same way women have repeatedly been victimized under patriarchy.

Like here's the thing: This dude probably has a (wrong and objectively awful) rationalization for all this, only it's buried so deep under miles and miles of systemic oppression of women that light itself is distorted down there in the bowels of his mind. Like, he may well actually believe that men are at 'greater risk' than women of being victimized, but only in the sense that he doesn't even bother to rationalize men's sexually inappropriate behaviors towards women as inappropriate in the first place. Like, a man slaps a woman's ass? That's normal, says this guy's rotten cesspool of a brain, happens all the time. But, a woman slaps a man's ass? Now that's a fucking problem!! And because it virtually never happens in modern society, the few times it might happen would actually stick out!!!

Now that I think of it I'm pretty sure the entirety of Persona 4: Golden works on identical assumptions about the way gender relations work, and yes, I seriously did just find a way to incorporate my hatred of how Golden mutilated Persona 4 into this thread. But there's a similarly delightful cognitive dissonance in how Hanako / Rise and Teddie / Yosuke's behavior toward the opposite gender are treated by the rest of the cast, namely the women are awful predators bucking social norms in the most horrendous ways for merely engaging in light public flirtation and the occasional shoulder-tapping, while the guys can run around pinching butts, stripping undergarments, making inappropriate comments and setting up non-consensual physical contact and WELP, THAT'S MEN BEING MEN EVERYBODY, like it's actually a sign of Teddie and Yosuke's health as masculine figures that they behave in such a way and if you dare have the Protag so much as voice a sensible objection suddenly you're the hellspawn demon for refusing to acknowledge what men are supposed to do.

[Karrrrrrrrrrrresche]

Holy shit.
Like, everything he did was unbelievably misogynistic, but perhaps the most telling sign of this guy's brazen misogyny is that, upon being called out, his default response to avoid condemnation for his misogynistic beliefs still involved advancing the argument that men were the bigger victims.



I might have misrepresented or misunderstood what you've just tried to say, but I want to be clear and not spread misinformation so I will say, not as a defense of his logic, but just for clarity (Partially because I'd hate it if you took something I represented poorly into a discussion with someone else and they tried to use it to deconstruct what is still a very valid assessment of his character tbh) What Sam Pepper is claiming is that the point of the social experiment was that both harassment of men and women are horrible things, but that there is a bias in our culture that would lead people to react more harshly to a man harassing a woman than the reverse.
I am going from memory and should not be taken as a word for word quote, but I believe he made reference to the sort of "Equality not feminism" bullshit that goes around a fair bit.

That said, of course, it being a social experiment is a bullshit premise to begin with because it wasn't even the first time he had posted a video of harassment dressed up as a "prank". He posted the women being harassed first, when if he wanted to see how people would react he to one or the other he should have done it the other way around, and FINALLY AND MOST... I initially used the word importantly but then realized that no this is not by a long shot what is important about this thing but whatever insert word here

Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, and plenty of other places have methods for posting something privately and then publishing it later. It's a thing. If you want to "predict" the super bowl next year you privately post all possible results and then publish the winner.
He could have done that. Easily. He could have told news outlets what he was doing beforehand and had them sign an agreement not to disclose, there were myriad fucking ways to make sure he could prove it was an experiment. He did none of them.


Just to say since earlier we were talking about the effectiveness of the outrage against him or something topically similar to that.

Since this whole thing started Sam Pepper's lost his media contract with Collective Digital Studios, is banned from Vidcon and numerous other outlets for publicity and money for him.

Most importantly though: Many of the cases of rape that we're hearing about are for obvious reasons very similar. They involve Sam Pepper manipulating others, using his fame as leverage over his fans to get sex, and those people he hurts feeling like they can't come forward for fear of the response they'd get from his fans. The more this story spreads, the less chance of him successfully doing that ever again.

[Solid Snake]

What Sam Pepper is claiming is that the point of the social experiment was that both harassment of men and women are horrible things, but that there is a bias in our culture that would lead people to react more harshly to a man harassing a woman than the reverse.

I understand that's the claim, I'm just saying that in arguing for "equality" as opposed to "feminism" he's still a Men's Right Advocate anyway. Women assaulting men in such a way simply isn't something that happens in society. The 'purpose' of making the series of videos would subsequently be the kind of false equivocation -- completely removed from any acknowledgement of analysis of the patriarchal culture we live in -- that Men's Right Advocates employ all the time, with the explicit intent of derailing feminist arguments in favor of some delectable B.S.

So, my point was that it's deliciously awful that, even in a point of 'crisis' for Peppers when he has every incentive to backtrack in order to preserve whatever tiny fragment of his reputation he can still claim, even then he's so convinced that the issue is how awful it is that women assaulting men can somehow 'get away with' more than their male counterparts. The harasser's so far up his ass in male privilege and entitlement that even in a moment where he deliberately attempts a 'concession' to try to salvage himself when public opinion turns against him, even that's still a commentary laced with misogyny.

[rpgdemon]

Women assaulting men in such a way simply isn't something that happens in society.

If "In such a way", you mean on video, to uproarious approval, all the time, then yeah. If you mean, "Women don't sexually assault men", that is untrue, and sort of weakens an otherwise strong argument. (Just pointing this out because it's really ambiguous, and I'm guessing someone will take it the other way around and assume it discredits the entire post.)

You know, his "excuse" is hilarious, in that it's pretty much the exact OPPOSITE of what a reasonable excuse would have been. If Sam Pepper were to have said, "I was doing it to show that when men abuse women, it's cheered for, but the reverse is condemned", he could have at least looked like less of a misogynistic ass, but he really just went full steam ahead and doubled down on the women-hating, as a way of excusing himself when people got angry because he was abusing women.